Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  The bombs had kept going off, not always by way of Weathermen associates. On the night of August 23, a stolen white Ford Falcon pulled up in front of a research building on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. At 3:40 A.M., an anonymous caller told police, “Hey, pig, there’s a bomb on the university campus. Clear the building.” Two minutes later, the truck—loaded with fertilizer, dynamite, and fuel oil—erupted into a fireball, uprooting trees and smashing windows in nearby buildings. Although the intended target was the Army Mathematics Research Center on the upper floors of the six-story building, the victim turned out to be a thirty-three-year-old research assistant (and father of three), then working in the physics department on the first floor. A manhunt ensued for the four men believed responsible, none associated with the Weathermen or other fringe groups. All were eventually tracked down and arrested, although it would take seven years.

  In Tulsa, a district judge was injured when a bomb went off in his station wagon. Firebombs crashed into police headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. From those and other bombings, forty people were dead, almost four hundred injured.

  For Richard Nixon, all of these jarring detonations and mayhem were, in a twisted way, good news. Even before Kent State, his approval ratings had been down, mirroring the plunge in the Dow that spring. As fall approached, inflation was still on the rise, and early polls taking the public’s temperature on a potential 1972 presidential race between him and Democratic Senator Edwin Muskie of Massachusetts placed them neck and neck.

  Then came the Weathermen, college demonstrations, and a general public that disliked the war but disdained scruffy campus protesters even more. (A post-Kent State clash in downtown New York, during which hard hats attacked antiwar activists, was a particularly telling sign for the administration.) Unnerved by the bombings—and comments like Dohrn’s about how her group was “everywhere”—the public was happy to let the so-called Establishment put its fist down, and the administration was more than eager to exploit the law-and-order atmosphere. That fall, Agnew talked up violence and government intervention in speeches, and FBI head J. Edgar Hoover warned of “dissident elements” who “strive violently to destroy our current way of life.” In an attempt to rebrand Nixon as a sympathetic figure, handlers made sure that unruly demonstrators interrupting him at rallies received ample media attention. Even one of Nixon’s gaffes—declaring Charles Manson guilty of murder before his trial had even begun—worked in his favor: Of course Manson did it, most people thought, especially once they saw courtroom photos of the ultimate deranged hippie. (Of course, they were right in that regard: Manson and his cohorts would be found guilty of first-degree murder.) By the fall, Nixon’s ratings had risen once again, and a November poll placed him eight points ahead of Muskie.

  The fall midterm elections didn’t go the White House’s way: Democrats gained ten seats in the Senate and nineteen in the House. In a memo to Nixon two days later, special counsel Charles Colson wrote his boss, “We did not succeed in making the public believe that Democrat, Liberal permissiveness was the cause of violence and crime.... We didn’t sell the point that violence and disorder in our society are caused directly by the rhetoric, softness, and catering to the dissidents which the Democrats have engaged in.” But the White House took some comfort anyway. A Vietnam referendum on the ballot found the majority (711,000) supported Nixon’s “peace plan” to end the war, compared to 440,000 who supported immediate withdrawal. “In the urban areas of the East, where fear of crime and violence is widespread,” Colson also wrote, “our stand on law and order was the key issue.”

  The election marked the first all-out use of a relatively new Republican tactic of luring Southern white Democrats to the opposing party by way of coded reference to Democracts’ alleged affiliations with black America and “liberal” leanings. In Tennessee, Republican Senate candidate William Brock—better known for the chocolate-covered cherries made by his very profitable Brock Candy Company than for any experience in politics—kept reminding voters that his opponent, Al Gore Sr., supported school busing and desegregation and was against the war and prayer in school. The GOP passed out Gore stickers and buttons to black voters in one largely African American county to make it clear to whites exactly who was in Gore’s camp, and Agnew deemed Gore the “Southern regional chairman of the Eastern liberal establishment.” It worked; after thirty-two years in the House and Senate, Gore lost his job on election day.

  For his media profile, Nixon turned that year, as he had in 1968, to a thirty-year-old New York television producer, Roger Ailes. In a memo to Nixon in May, Ailes gave the President and his team pointers on televised appearances, such as having Nixon carry a handkerchief to wipe away perspiration and urging him to act warmer toward his own wife. (“Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public,” Ailes wrote. “The more attention she gets, the happier they are.”) Making the most of the medium—and scaring the hell out of white voters—were proving to be effective forms of voter persuasion, and Nixon went along, sometimes begrudgingly and sometimes willingly, with what appeared to be a trend of the future.

  The Beatles continued to haunt them. On November 8, Crosby was back in San Francisco. With members of the Dead, he recorded “Laughing,” written two years before about George Harrison’s devotion to Indian spirituality. The song wasn’t just about Harrison. (“It was a response, but not just about George,” Crosby recalled. “Anybody who tells you ‘I’ve been talking to God’ is full of shit.”) But it cast a wary eye on spiritual saviors in the same way Lennon had on Plastic Ono Band. With his layers of twelve-string guitars and Garcia’s aching pedal steel guitar, which seemed to turn into a fiddle, “Laughing” was another massive, engulfing sonic cavern from the Crosby sessions. Joni Mitchell, whose bond with Crosby extended farther back than hers with Nash, contributed a spiraling, cooing harmony as well.

  Whether CSNY, like the Beatles, would converge again remained an open question, the unsteady stuff of whims and moods. The informal reunion in London hadn’t taken hold; to the press, Elliot Roberts declared that a group tour in the summer of 1971 was “a guess.” Did Ertegun or Lookout Management make a mistake pushing for Young to join Crosby, Stills & Nash to begin with? Did they sacrifice short-term financial gain for the long-term group cohesion? Or were they always meant to come together and fall apart? “We were doing what we always intended,” Stills recalled, “which was to make a couple of records together and then go away from each other for a while before we killed each other.”

  In November, the record Stills had been slaving away on all year, Stephen Stills, became the next sign of disharmony in the band. The album was a road map of Stills’ previous six months. Some of it had been cut during his visit to London in the spring, the cover presented Stills with his mysterious, intimate-message toy giraffe, and Coolidge sang on several songs and was the subject of two others, “Cherokee” and “Sit Yourself Down.” For someone who valued his privacy, Stills exposed more about his personal life on his first album than any of the rest of CSNY.

  By then, each man’s songs and approach to music-making reflected his personality: Nash’s orderly and tidy, Crosby’s laissez-faire and permissive, Young’s sturdy and focused, Stills’ nervy and headstrong. If After the Gold Rush was an indisputably well-built house of songs, Stephen Stills was a messy room that wouldn’t have it any other way. The album moved from a raw-voiced, ferociously picked acoustic blues, “Black Queen,” to a lushly orchestrated ballad, “To a Flame,” pausing along the way for a nod to gospel (“Church [Part of Someone]”), a ballad that could have been part of a Greenwich Village folk repertoire (“Do for the Others”), and scene-stealing cameos by Hendrix (“Old Times Good Times”) and Clapton (“Go Back Home”). Stills’ creative ambitions were on full display: None of the others in his current band would have attempted, nor pulled off, a piece of orchestrated folk rock with gospel midsection like the climactic “We Are Not Helpless,” complete with Ringo
Starr on drums. Stills’ voice, too, ran the gamut from supple to whiskey-roughedup. In the way it moved restlessly from one genre to another, Stephen Stills attested to Stills’ burning-at-both-ends intensity that both drove him and, as the fall progressed, threatened to derail him at any moment. (With its songs’ subtle instrumental and rhythm shifts, it also pinpointed Stills’ painstaking devotion to the craft of recordmaking—a vastly different approach from Young’s, who preferred as much spontaneity as possible.)

  Even before the album was out, Stills was already at work on its follow-up, driving himself even harder. Kept awake by any number of substances, Stills and his engineer and coproducer, Bill Halverson, would stay up for days at Island Studios in London, recording song after song, take after take, variation after variation. They cut “Change Partners,” two years old but prophetic given CSNY’s situation, in different tempos; at Stills’ expense, the Memphis Horns were flown over from the States for a taste of the big-band rock then in vogue. “Stephen heard what was in his head and was chasing it,” Halverson says. “But I was starting to lose perspective. Some of those long three or four days together, what we ended up with, we didn’t want.”

  In London, Stills’ days and nights became a nonstop blur of activity, musical and otherwise. Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones and Robert Plant dropped by. Stills would start recording, take a break, and go to a club, where he could watch Princess Anne dance or meet Peter Sellers, in whose former house Stills was now living. One night, he dragged Sellers back to the studio at three in the morning to hear his tapes. When Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention came through town, Stills jammed with them onstage and caroused with them in their dressing room later. In his brown Jaguar, he drove to an airport and flew to Amsterdam to join the Stones onstage, then partied with them until dawn in Keith Richards’ hotel room. Hearing that his Mulholland Drive dragracing buddy Steve McQueen was filming Le Mans outside Paris—and hoping he could write the score for the film—Stills rented a Mercedes and drove it onto a ferry bound for France. When he arrived at the racetrack where they were filming, he discovered McQueen and his crew had already left.

  Back in England, he tooled around the countryside in his other car, a Ferrari, and bought two Thoroughbreds from an Irish horse dealer. Deliveries for the wine cellar would appear regularly. One day’s shipment included four bottles of 1960 Château Mouton Rothschild, six of Kruger champagne, six of Dom Perignon, and four of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Inevitably, empty bottles were scattered on the lawn near a fence. “It was wicked dangerous because there were nasty things crawling about,” Stills recalled. “And I managed to walk that razor’s edge. Probably not without making an utter fool of myself.”

  Somehow it was fitting that Stills and Starr would find themselves face-to-face again at Tramp during the first week of December. Try as they might, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young couldn’t escape the sobriquet “American Beatles” that had been bestowed upon them. “The Let It Be stuff was overhanging the whole year,” Stills recalled, “that they were basically ready to kill each other. And I guess we got caught up in that too. We could all feel it. It permeated the whole industry. We were all getting very full of ourselves, and it was probably time to not be restricted by running everything by your mates, because some of them may understand what you’re doing and some might not.” Like the Beatles, CSNY had experienced it all: early camaraderie, dizzying fame, endless hours in recording studios, ample drug experimentation, mounting interpersonal tensions, and, finally, disarray. Remarkably, though, they’d managed to do it not in a decade but in a mere eighteen months.

  CHAPTER 15

  When Paul Simon called Clive Davis to arrange a meeting, Columbia’s convivial president didn’t think twice. As far as Davis knew, Simon and Garfunkel were in healthy shape professionally and financially. In early July, they’d been presented with a gold record for sales of five hundred thousand copies of “Cecilia,” the galloping follow-up to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Although the Bridge album was drooping on the charts—and “El Condor Pasa,” its third single, failed to commandeer the airwaves the way “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Cecilia” had—it continued to generate substantial income for the label. One report that crossed Davis’ desk cited figures from Austria, where the company made a tidy $120,000 off twenty thousand Bridge LPs and $60,000 from the “El Condor Pasa” single. And that was merely one relatively small market.

  Besides, Davis had other, troubling matters on his mind. On the morning of October 5, the phone had rung earlier than usual in his Central Park West apartment. One of his young sons answered and delivered the news to his still-sleeping father: Janis Joplin, one of the first acts Davis signed to Columbia, was dead, her body found facedown at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood. One of her hands was still clutching a cigarette, and one of her arms carried fresh needle marks. Davis knew Joplin loved a good time—he’d noticed her taste for Southern Comfort almost from the day he’d met her—but the news was still shocking. Joplin had just completed a new album; the day before her death, she’d sat for a photo session for its cover. Whether he was naïve or in denial, Davis said he knew nothing of her fondness for heroin—which, combined with alcohol, had led to her death.

  For Davis and others in the music business, it had been that kind of paralyzing fall. It wasn’t merely the succession of deaths: Canned Heat’s Al Wilson of an overdose in his sleeping bag on September 3, followed by Hendrix, and now Joplin. The superstars who hadn’t died weren’t functioning as they once had. Sly Stone, who recorded for Columbia’s sister label Epic, was increasingly consumed by a drug problem, delaying his in-progress album and leading to a succession of missed concerts. In late September, Jim Morrison was found guilty of indecent exposure and profanity in a Florida courtroom, stemming from a neverproven accusation of pulling out his penis onstage with the Doors the previous year. Morrison was sentenced to six months’ hard labor for the first charge, sixty days for the second. Motown still landed dazzling singles in the top 10 all year—Edwin Starr’s “War,” the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There,” Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed Delivered (I’m Yours)”—but Marvin Gaye had temporarily retired from music, the Four Tops were stalled, and Wonder was in a changeover from child star to adulthood. The company, and black music in general, was in the midst of transitioning from love songs to socially conscious ones. “The Tears of a Clown,” the only major hit Smokey Robinson and the Miracles had pulled off that year, was a three-year-old recording.

  The government was making other, equally rattling, noises about the business. On October 14, just over a week after Joplin’s overdose, Richard Nixon summoned a group of radio, news, and advertising executives to the Oval Office to talk about drugs and rock and roll. The assembled included radio programmers from around the country, the heads of ABC News and the national association of FM broadcasters, and Nixon’s old friend Gene Autry, the singing cowboy who now ran the Golden West radio network. One daunting administration figure after another—John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, officials from the Narcotics Bureau and the FCC—issued dire warnings about the connections between drug abuse and the music, and radio executives were asked to screen songs for drug references. To ram home the point, members of a New York drug-rehab center put on a skit. No hard-and-fast rules were laid out, but the chilling effect was felt by everyone in the room.

  As if he’d already received the meeting’s subliminal message, Mike Curb, the young Republican head of MGM Records, announced he was dropping eighteen acts who supposedly promoted hard drugs in their songs. “I’m tired of hearing about these drugged-up acts who don’t show up for a television appearance,” Curb griped to a reporter. Curb didn’t name the specific artists whose contracts were being terminated, only saying he’d retained Roy Orbison, former Righteous Brother Bill Medley, and, strangely, hard-living former Animals frontman Eric Burdon (whose “Spill the Wine” just happened to be a major MGM hit that summer). Given Curb’s well-known political ambitions, many wo
ndered if the move was his first step in running for office. (In fact, he would later be elected California’s lieutenant governor.) Davis was the first label head to denounce Curb, publicly chiding him for what Davis called “artistic witch hunts.”

  Relative to this string of disquieting news, a phone call from Paul Simon was a stroll in the park, Central or otherwise. At the start, their relationship had been a little frosty. Simon seemed wary of Davis and his background in accounting. He and Garfunkel had bonded far better with Davis’ predecessor, Goddard Lieberson; over their first lunch together, all three talked about classic fiction and poetry. But after Davis made the right call with the soundtrack to The Graduate and allowed Simon however much time he needed to craft his music, the two gradually grew tighter. Over the occasional meal, Davis listened as Simon let down his notorious guard. Despite a string of hit singles, Simon told Davis he felt he wasn’t taken as seriously as some of his peers. “If you were viewed as a pop tunesmith, a hit songwriter, someone who didn’t move the social frontiers forward, you were relegated to secondary consideration,” Davis recalled. “Paul felt Dylan was getting more respect than him. He was keenly aware of that.” An avid reader of the rock press, Davis listened, nodded, and coddled. He told Simon he was one of the great songwriters of his era, his work equal to that of Lennon and McCartney.

  Even though he was in tune with Simon’s neuroses, Davis wasn’t prepared for the topic of conversation when Simon arrived at his office at CBS headquarters in the Black Rock building on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. After a bit of small talk, Simon told Davis he and Garfunkel were no more and that he’d be making records on his own.

  The head of Columbia Records was taken aback, both by the news and the straightforwardness of Simon’s declaration of independence. “It wasn’t, ‘What’s your advice?’” Davis recalled. “He wasn’t coming to ask my advice. He was coming to tell me a fact.”